Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Hooray! Orson Scott Card (proper author type guy) and mp3s
Art Watch - September 7, 2003 - MP3s Are Not the Devil - The Ornery American:
"So it's pretty hilarious to hear record company executives and movie studio executives get all righteous about copyright. They've been manipulating copyright laws for years, and all the manipulations were designed to steal everything they could from the actual creators of the work.
Do you think these companies care about the money that the actual creators of the work are being deprived of when people copy CDs and DVDs?
Here's a clue: Movie studios have, for decades, used 'creative accounting' to make it so that even hit movies never manage to break even, thus depriving the creative people of their 'percentage of profits.' A few have dared to sue, but most figure that it isn't worth the ill will. (The sentence 'You'll never work in this town again' runs through their minds. They remember what happened to Cliff Robertson after he blew the whistle on an executive who was flat-out embezzling!)
And record companies manage to skim enormous amounts of money from ever CD sold. As you can easily calculate by going to the computer store and figuring out the price of an individual recordable blank CD. Figure that the record companies have been paying a fraction of that price for years. Then subtract that from the price of a CD. Figure the songwriters and performers are getting some ludicrously small percentage -- less than twenty percent, I'd bet -- and all the rest flows to the record company. "
Aaaight!
"So it's pretty hilarious to hear record company executives and movie studio executives get all righteous about copyright. They've been manipulating copyright laws for years, and all the manipulations were designed to steal everything they could from the actual creators of the work.
Do you think these companies care about the money that the actual creators of the work are being deprived of when people copy CDs and DVDs?
Here's a clue: Movie studios have, for decades, used 'creative accounting' to make it so that even hit movies never manage to break even, thus depriving the creative people of their 'percentage of profits.' A few have dared to sue, but most figure that it isn't worth the ill will. (The sentence 'You'll never work in this town again' runs through their minds. They remember what happened to Cliff Robertson after he blew the whistle on an executive who was flat-out embezzling!)
And record companies manage to skim enormous amounts of money from ever CD sold. As you can easily calculate by going to the computer store and figuring out the price of an individual recordable blank CD. Figure that the record companies have been paying a fraction of that price for years. Then subtract that from the price of a CD. Figure the songwriters and performers are getting some ludicrously small percentage -- less than twenty percent, I'd bet -- and all the rest flows to the record company. "
Aaaight!
